He can hang out with Phil Gramm as they cry in their expensive scotch.
A friend just pointed out to me that, on a trip in South Africa, at one point, her children were given the opportunity to pet lion cubs, free, in some kind of reserve. She only pieced it together, later, that the cubs were being farm-raised to be hunted as adults.
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Are you saying that a hunter should eat everything he kills to be moral? I tend to agree - not a fan of trophy hunting other than where required for environmental reasons. But challenging oneself through a complex/difficult hobby like hunting is FUN in the same deep and meaningful way that woodworking, civil aviation, mountain climbing, or scuba is.
Are you saying that morally it must be a grim and joyless business even if one is doing it to survive?
FWIW - Iāll grant that the ādeep funā of the challenge of hunting can be equally met with wildlife photography.
OK, thatās pretty terrible. I do hope your friend spared her kids this particular harsh reality. My kid would be devastated to learn that a cub he got to pet was going to be murdered by some rich psychopath in a couple years.
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The computer canāt win, though its convenient to say it does. What weāre really saying, though, is the programmers/creators of the system that led to the chess game existing won.
Same with shooting a gun. In a game where winning and losing are defined in relation to taking a lifeāan inanimate object canāt win or lose. It has no goals whatsoever. Now, if the target was placed in a tricky location or something along those lines, you might say that the person who placed it won or lost, but not the target.
Put a target on a computer controlled arm, and have it move about according to a program designed to make the shooter miss and the same thing applies. The computer/program is the proxy of the programmer(s) and you can conveniently ascribe the concept of win/lose as a shorthand to it, but in reality it applies to the people who created the computer/program, just as if they ran around holding the target and tried to make you miss. They are the ones that have goals which were achieved or were not achieved, not the hardware or code, any more then a marionette could be accurately said to āwinā any contest ā itās the puppeteer controlling it. Inanimate objects donāt have goals intrinsic to themselves, they canāt win/lose.
Crap, Iām done for.
Wait, what if I am stupid and also unfunny?
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Iām saying there are sanctioned hunts by big game hunters on national park land. Their money actually pays for the rangers who patrol against poachers wanting to sell bladders to China or what ever.
So while some people seem to think this act in any context is despicable, I disagree.
In this incident it sounds very shady. While I think there is a possibility this guy got duped into thinking he had a legal hunt he was paying for, I am not sure I believe he is innocent. Though I suppose innocent before proven guilty.
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Shit if they banned those this place would be a ghost town. ( I keed, I keed.)
Just pointing out life in the wild is a total bitch.
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I could reduce anyone who says things I disagree with to member of a āshame mobāā¦ Itās a bit ad hominem though, calling them a name rather than debating their ideas. So I donāt.
Also, itās a shorter leap from minimizing people for having opinions you donāt understand to hanging the head of an apex predator from an ecosystem you donāt understand on your wall, than you might think.
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Yes, your grasp of Lion sociology is profound. /s
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Arenāt humans the apex predators?
Not in the National Park ecosystem.
I, for one, am sick and tired of invertibrate erasure.
They arenāt as much predators as parasites and/or scavengers.
Even mantises and spiders?
I guess birds eat them, but there are bird eating spiders too.
Are rhinos apex herbivores?
Depends on context and species. I think there are ecosystems where even they can end up as a component of ethnic cuisines.
Alls Iām saying is that if youāre asserting that meat eaters are hypocrites in their criticism of this guy, youād better be Jain.
āCharismatic megafaunaā is a conservationist term meaning āanimals we can get people to give a shit about.ā To take an example from that link, if you tell people that Chinese development is destroying thousands of unique and irreplaceable species of plants and birds and insects, they yawn and change the subject. So instead you focus all your energy on one cute, popular species, the panda, in hopes that interest in panda preservation will incidentally also lead to preserving panda habitats and all the other species that survive there.
Iām not criticizing that practice at all; itās what you have to do to get the job done. But it is worth pointing out peopleās hypocrisy, if you can get them to listen.
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No. The only thing he regrets is that the attention is bad for business. I canāt imagine why anyone would not immediately want him to stick his disgusting hands back in their mouths.
